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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | A Whiter Shade of Pale: White Femininity as Guilty Masquerade in 'New' (White) South African Women's Writing |
Author: | Horrell, Georgina |
Year: | 2004 |
Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
Volume: | 30 |
Issue: | 4 |
Period: | December |
Pages: | 765-776 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | women writers white women identity Literature, Mass Media and the Press Women's Issues literature |
About person: | Gillian Slovo (1952-) |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/4133882 |
Abstract: | 'Hybrid' identity has been posited as a desirable ideal in postapartheid South Africa. For white writers, this is as yet unrealized: white writing is still white writing. Indeed, contemporary writing in or of the New South Africa both conceals and displays a crisis in identity and subjectivity for whites - and in particular for white women. Gillian Slovo describes the necessity for role play, for a masquerade of normative feminine whiteness, during the years of apartheid and political detentions. However, the writing of her autobiography, which in many ways is not so much Gillian's life story as that of her parents, enacts a further, more complex masquerade. This article unmasks hidden dilemmas of femininity, gesturing towards the troubled negotiations of a number of white women writers. The notion of femininity as masquerade is explicated in Joan Riviere's now well-known psychoanalytic essay, 'Womanliness as a Masquerade' (1929). Reference to Riviere's essay is not to excavate (colonial) psychoanalytic discourse unquestioningly as an apt tool for reading postcolonial texts, but rather to read this somewhat against the grain, so as to enable a reading of contemporary South African women's narratives which reveals traces of white femininity's dilemmas. The representations of white women in the texts of Gillian Slovo, Elleke Boehmer and Sarah Penny mark discursive paths - inscriptions of whiteness, guilt and culpability. In a part of the world being 'painted over again', some white women writers must, it would seem, seek a whiter shade of pale. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |